A hand-book of uterine therapeutics, and of diseases of women / by Edward John Tilt.

  • Tilt, Edward John, 1815-1893.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A hand-book of uterine therapeutics, and of diseases of women / by Edward John Tilt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    A HANDBOOK UTERINE THERAPEUTICS DISEASES OF WOMEN. INTRODUCTION. To the student in medicine, there are few subjects which present greater difficulties than the study of the diseases peculiar to women, particularly in England. The diseases are common enough in the out-patient depart- ments of any of the larger hospitals, but the special hospitals for dis- eases of women are small. In our great hospitals few beds are given to the obstetric physicians, and clinical instruction in diseases of women, like all other clinical instruction in England, is scarce and incomplete when compared with its daily delivery in continental hospitals. The re- sult is that the student starts in practice with the most meagre knowl- edge of that great class of diseases which he must daily encounter if he has any practice at all. A wrong diagnosis is the result, treatment worse than useless is adopted; the patient continuing to suffer, either finds better advice elsewhere, or her real condition is undetected, and she re- mains for the rest of her life a helpless incurable, seldom free from pain, and worn out in body and mind. A glance at what gynecologists have done, at the present state of gynecology, at the conflicting tendencies of leading men, and at the impediments that lie in the student's path, will not be out of place. The youthfulness of gynecology is the first thing to observe, for it may be said to date from 1816, when Recamier insisted on the necessity of studying diseases of women as much as possible by ocular demonstration, like all other diseases. This taking of gynecology out of the shadowy regions of conjecture, had no effect on English ob-